on I was recently picked up by Palatium books for distribution in Europe. I’m super psyched about that because they curate their authors. Only the bestest at words. Me!
Here’s their site: https://www.palatiumbooks.com and a few of the places you should be able to find my books: 
on Please head on over and show it some love, so far I’ve uploaded to chapter eight. Did I mention that Margaret Atwood is on Wattpad? Cool huh?
xox,
H.D.
on I really hope you enjoy.
It’s a coming-into-(her own)-power story about a young girl who takes on an authoritarian government. The story is full of good friends, tight-knit families, love-sweet-love and not one but two boys, also fashion, protest, stolen kisses, and a pretty awesome chase scene. There’s definitely that moment where you wonder, What Can Happen Next? Did I mention parties? Rock stars? Truck drivers and Old Endearing Farmers? As in most of my books there’s a bit of surfing and a dash of wishful thinking. Also, the government is definitely poisoning the water system, so really something must be done. And lastly don’t forget the cat named Walden. He kind of saves the day around the middle of our story. (It gets worse again.)
There’s drama, excitement, plans are made, some fail, some succeed, but in the end, nothing can be done but the only thing that’s left.
I think you will love it and here’s a small taste:
“This is how Cj explained it.” William swept his arm toward the woods. “We have a tree, that’s our culture and our government, our hierarchy of power. The branches and leaves are the parts that show, our fashion and designs, like our water system and medicines and our sky projectors and all the other things.”
We walked closer to the tree and looked up into the branches.
He said, “In all of that, we—you and me and everyone else—we’re the roots. Now, some of us, we see the leaves are not right, they need to be changed. So we’re trying to change them but there’s this whole system between us and the change. It’s standing in the way, but the leaves are flashy and sparkly and we’ve focused all our attention on them.”
“Like we’re trying to fix the water system, but not doing anything about the disappearances.”
“Exactly. You originally wanted to turn off the sky projectors. To do that you built a farm and then you had to fight for the right to farm. Along the way you had to fight for the right to publish. To not be imprisoned. We’ve been fighting over all these individual leaves for a long time.”
I said, “We need to deal with the trunk.”
“That’s where the power is.”
I laughed. “That will be easy.”
William said, “Chainsaw.”
I said, “Is that what cuts trees? I wouldn’t know, I’ve lived as a root my whole life.”
William threw his arm around me and hugged me close as we walked. “Did I tell you today how much I love you?”
The print book will be ready soon!
on I’m dying to tell you what happens, but can’t spoil anything, so you’ll just have to wait until the day its released, June 25th.
But know this:
if you wanted Estelle to be a Strong Female character (and by that you don’t mean that she can kill people with her bare hands, or leap buildings with a single bound, or never miss with her aim, but prefer your strong females to be ordinary and normal yet able to accomplish amazing things) she is. She definitely is.
Can’t wait to hear what you think!
on Pre-ordering helps me, because all the sales for the entire pre-ordering time period load onto Amazon on the same day. Might I be catapulted into best-seller land? We can only wait and see. And pre-order ;o)
The third book of the Estelle Series, Belief, can be pre-ordered here:
One of my beta-readers said this: “I’ve read everything you’ve written so far and this is my favorite.”
My new novella, Leveling, can be pre-ordered here:
It’s a romantic sexy story in only 20,000 pages. Not for kids.
on 
The idea for Violet’s Mountain came to me as an image. A woman standing on top of a mountain of hoarded things. A trash pile, but more orderly. And huge. Her hair streams out behind her in the wind. Seagulls circle overhead. The whole scene is blue, grey, greens, like the ocean.
She can’t come down, won’t come down. The mountain is her creation, but also her trap. She’s stuck there out of duty and remorse and guilt and longing and sadness, because who else will keep the mountain standing? Who else?
That image stuck with me—trapped girl, in need of a rescue. Have you ever tried to rescue someone who piles things around their grief? To stop someone who is piling things up and up and up around themselves. Building a fortress to hide behind, ever tried it?
The girl on the mountain believes she is needed there. To hold it all together. She’s needed. And protected. And fine, thank you very much. Move along.
And there’s the theme. Can Violet be rescued from her mountain? And how, if she refuses to leave? It was a challenge, furthered by wanting Violet to be a strong female character.
Could Violet be rescued and still be strong? Could her rescuer use force and still be worthy of forgiveness?
Yes. Because he becomes her mountain after all.
Want to add it to your goodreads shelf?
Do it right here ;o)
on Vellum is f*cking amazing. Okay that’s it.
Fine, I’ll say more. I’ve published 4+ novels as ebooks now. At least 8 other books that were image heavy and I barely lived to tell about it. It sucks. Every e-reader requires a different method, a different file, different margins, fonts, or sizing, a different upload site. Each e-reader format required a different password/process for uploading and conversion.
Then, besides all of that, sometimes in the magic blinky moment of document creation the file would end up wonky. With no reason at all.
Here’s a for instance: Violet’s Mountain print book is beautiful. Lovely margins, fonts, styled headings. I was very proud.
Then to format it for kindle I had to strip it of all of that and after tweaking and begging and pleading to the universe ended up with a file that was big Times Roman for headings and small Times Roman for the body. And it sucked. But I gave up and went with it. Even though the chapter headings came literally right after the previous chapter’s final sentence.
I published it because it was “good enough.” And I couldn’t find any tools for making it better.
Then I found a typo on page 56. I fixed the typo, reloaded the exact same file and from then on the title page looked like this:
Violet’s Mountai
n
What the…?
That is not how it is supposed to look.
Enter Vellum. I heard about it at Christmas, and downloaded the software the first week in January. I Learned how to use it in about an hour and had completely renovated Violet’s Mountain within two hours. I pushed a button, generated it for all formats, and voila. It was done.
It is beautiful. There are fonts! There are page structures that look pretty and make sense! There are chapters that have their own pages and I didn’t have to locate eye of newt or break out the giant caudron. Witchcraft skills are optional.
I am not an affiliate. (Crap, maybe I should be?) But if you’re getting ready to publish anything, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
You’re welcome.
xox,
H.D.
ps. the all new formatted Violet’s Mountain is for sale here: http://www.amazon.com/Violets-Mountain-H-D-Knightley-ebook/dp/B017IZS1G4/
on Violet’s Mountain is a quirky, Magical Realism romance—think Chocolat without the food. Or Holes but with some steamy sex. I believe it was inspired by my love for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but maybe inspired is too strong of a word. I haven’t read Love in the Time of Cholera or One Hundred Years of Solitude or Chronicle of a Death Foretold or No One Writes to the Colonel in about 25 years, so if I had to tell you what they were about…hmmmmm…can’t remember? And also, it must be said, Gabriel Garcia is a f*!cking amazing writer.
Violet is a mysterious young woman who lives atop a giant mountain of hoarded things. By day she is a heavy machine operator, piling more things up and up and up. By night she adorns the top of the pile with welded steel, sculptural whirligigs.
She builds, she creates, she welds, she lifts heavy boxes, she drives cranes, she’s a total bad ass.
But in the story you barely get to know her, before everything shifts.
Instead you get to know Lala, her cousin. Violet has been her guardian, but as Lala puts it, “I can’t leave her, she’s so arty that she forgets to eat.”
You meet Benjamin, the young man who falls in love and wants to charm Violet down from the hoard and take her away to the city.
And you meet Edmund, the surfing environmentalist, heir to an oil fortune, who wants to rescue her and doesn’t know how. He rocks her world.
The story is about love, duty, and rescue. Love in spite of our shortcomings. Duty to family over all else. And rescue in spite of ourselves. And whether, when your world comes crashing down, you can find forgiveness for the one who caused your collapse.
It is available now on Amazon. Here: amazon.com/Violets-Mountain-H-D-Knightley-ebook/dp/B017IZS1G4/
on 
Beyond (Book Two of The Estelle Series) will be free from October 14-October 18. But we’ll go ahead and get started with some beginning parts to get you ready…
This first section was available online already, I’ll add an extra chapter:
1: Interrupting Me
My best, softest, most-loved chair was a concession to Sylvia that there simply must be comfortable places to sit on my farm. Must be. Sylvia of course meant new and beautiful chairs, but she’s grown wise enough to use the word comfortable. So I relented, because she was right.
I had jokingly told her I wanted the chair to be royal blue velvet, because the hot color right now was orange, and the hot fabric was a chiffon, light and airy. I figured it would keep her busy for a while. But in my year and a half on the farm I had forgotten how New City was good at designing, building and delivering things that are new and absolutely lovely. The chairs (because Sylvia, in her exuberance, had ordered two from Jonathon, her favorite designer) were deep blue velvet and overstuffed. The legs and arms had wooden carvings of vines running up them, and the vines turned into intricate beading along the edges. In days gone by it would have meant they were lovingly hand-crafted, but today, in New City, it meant that we had invented ways to make things beautiful. It was almost all we ever did.
So I woke up on the farm one day, and there was a truck delivering two beautiful chairs. William and I faced them toward each other, in the dirt at the edge of the kitchen garden, near our living space, yet sort of in a field, and fell into them. Sylvia said, “They’re meant to go indoors!” She was incredulous and indignant, but we just laughed and promised to take them inside when it rained. We propped our feet into each other’s seat and settled in. William and I loved those chairs.
William was my friend, my best friend, my boyfriend.
He was not the young man who had been chosen for me—instead the Governmental Oversee chose Jack Maranville. Jack was normal and steady and handsome, yet aware of it. Jack was powerful and important and not the kind of guy that should be thrown over by a girl, but I had done that. It was a testament to his obstinacy that he still came around sometimes. To visit. Or to check in. Or probably more likely to check on.
Continue reading Beyond (excerpts) Chapter One, Two, Three, and Four
on This book wasn’t easy to write. I was nervous. I wanted to know where Estelle went next, what she dreamed of, who she dreamed with, and yes, does she get to keep kissing the hunky William, but I was worried I might break the story, get bogged down, or I don’t know—blow it.
I’m happy to say that the first reviews are in and I didn’t.
I decided that book two would be a big adventure and a rescue. Estelle of course would be the heroine, but she needed a side-kick, so I chose Angela (you met her very briefly in book one.) So Beyond is two girls on an adventure. Hopefully that doesn’t spoil the story too much.
Here’s a pinterest page so you can get the feel: pinterest.com/hdknightley/beyond
It already has a review:
“I had greatly enjoyed reading Bright but I didn’t have such a visceral reaction as I did when reading Beyond. I can tell when a book is good when I get stressed out and anxious while reading (that’s a good thing) and I can’t put it down to go to sleep because I’ll end up tossing and turning thinking about it instead. By the end of this book I practically had no nails left!” – J.B. Fox
The kindle version will be free from October 14th-October 18th, 2015. I’ll remind you. But if you want to get the paperback version, here it is:
Thank you. I’m writing the third of the series now. And moments away from releasing a romance, Violet’s Mountain.
xox,
H.